Michael Lavorgna

'Tis the season and we offer a short but sweet selection. This time of year I also like to reflect upon all the things we have in addition to all of the things we don't and take a moment to be thankful for just being here.

Happy Holidays and may your 2012 be filled with music! On with the list...

During the course of my video interview with Scott Wilkinson of Home Theater, a viewer asked a question regarding Async USB DACs and uncompressed FLAC playback and I did not have a good answer. So I did some research. And I still did not come up with a compelling answer. So I sent off an email to Gordon Rankin of Wavelength Audio since he was the first to implement the Async USB mode in a consumer audio DAC and he's done some listening tests comparing FLAC to WAV files. Here's what I asked Gordon:

In October of 2014, we moved to a new/older house that sits on 4+ acres down a private dirt road in the wilds of New Jersey. This home also came with a separate barn, which is my where I work (and listen to music). Details....

Do FLAC files sound inferior to WAV files? Or more generally, do lossless compressed file formats (FLAC, ALAC, APE...) sound worse than their uncompressed twins? I've seen the argument that due to the extra processing imposed on your computer by FLAC, for example, during playback, this method is more prone to computer-introduced timing errors. Stepping back from this scenario for a moment, everyone seems to agree that the less your computer does during music playback the better it sounds so it would make sense to apply this same logic to the actual playback process. No?

As if to say "Take That!", a few days after my Nirvana Nevermind post, I received an email from David Chesky of HD Tracks which eventually led to a complimentary download of Ella Fitzgerald's Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! ($24.98). I had two choices, 96kHz/24bit and 192kHz/24bit and I opted for the latter. I figured it would be fun comparing it to my old Verve LP of the same title.

OK. Back in the hotel, showered. Our power company said, "We expect to have 95% of customers in your area to have power by the end of Thursday and the remaining 5% by Friday night." Guess what? Looks like we're in the top 5%!

Six inches of snow more or less doesn't sound like anything to talk about. But in October in NJ when the trees are still ripe with multicolored leaves and power lines weave in and out of their branches for nearly every mile of the town you live in and then some, it spells outage. We lost power on Saturday at around 6pm and our local power company expects to have it back "by Thursday or Friday".

So here I sit in a lovely hotel room looking out over the closed pool with not a drop of snow in site. I plan to take a long shower, get some warm dinner (and cold beer) and get back to AudioStream(ing) soon. Sorry for the lull.

If you haven't seen Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo I cannot recommend it highly enough. It tells the tale of a man obsessed with music and bringing his beloved opera to an isolated Peruvian village. During these few days of silence, I see the genius in owning a mechanical Victrolla for those times when we need music's warming embrace and have nothing more to power it than desire.

One of the questions in terms of deciding whether or not to go down the native DSD-road is—where does one get DSD music? While you can rip SACDs, that’s the subject of an entire article on its own but suffice it to say it is not a simple procedure (you can start here). In terms of downloads, I’m only aware of one source at present www.downloads.net and their DSD offerings are $40/album and the selection is limited to under 20 titles.

From a computer audio perspective, the promise of Cloud-based music services is another bright spot on the horizon. However the present state of the science fails to deliver a compelling case for those interested in CD-quality or better playback of the music they already own. In other words, why spend time and money only to get back a poorer version of the original?

If you’re reading this odds are you already own a music server. And a music streamer and a network music player with access to millions of songsfor free. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that we live in an age of musical abundance with access to more music than at any other time in history. Technology has brought the world’s living music library into our homes and onto our smartphones.